Before The Truth Has Got Its Boots On
by Shamrock
Summary: The weight of it, of both the question and the lie she would have to tell to answer it and keep him, is suddenly more than Helena can bear. Myka/HG. Post 'Instinct' fix-it fic.


'_Tell me a story, Pew._

_What kind of story, child?_

_A story with a happy ending._

_There's no such thing in all the world._

_As a happy ending?  
As an ending.'_

_-Jeanette Winterson, 'Lighthousekeeping'_

When Myka and Pete arrive back at the B&B Claudia can't help the quick, hopeful glance she throws over their shoulders, nor can she hold back the brief flash of disappointment in her eyes as she realises they're alone.

"So how'd it go?" the young woman asks in a more sombre tone than she's used to, already reading the answer in the tired lines of Myka's body, in the way Pete is standing extra close to her as though his sheer physical presence can prop her up.

"We got the bad guys," Myka offers, and without another word makes her way up the stairs towards her room.

Pete watches her go, then turns to Claudia and shrugs helplessly. "HG is staying in Wisconsin." Off her sharply raised eyebrow he continues, "she's living with this dude and his kid, playing happy families. She says she's done with the Warehouse, done with," his eyes flick to the stairs his partner just disappeared up, "all of it. She wants a normal life."

"What?" Claudia's disbelief is written all over her face. "Pete, she's _H.G. Wells_. She's a hundred and fifty years old, pretty much created the sci-fi genre and worked for two Warehouses a century apart. How is her life ever going to even approach normal?"

"Yeah, I- I know Claud." Pete's face clouds as he holds up a hand to ward off any further questions. "Look it's all messed up and Myka's... I just really need to sleep okay? It's been a long couple of days." And so it has - watching the two of them circle each other, trying to hold Myka together when everything started to fall apart, bearing silent, uncomfortable witness to the worst breakup he'd ever encountered between two people who weren't actually dating, it's exhausted him.

Claudia nods and casts a worried glance upstairs. "Is she okay?"

Pete is too tired to hold in the anger he's been biting back on since Wisconsin. "When it comes to HG, is she ever?"

The younger woman has no reply to that and in her silence he turns and climbs the stairs, shoulders slumped, the weight of his best friend's grief showing in every step.

* * *

Helena used to love the darkness. She would lie awake as a child, creating stories underneath the bed covers, the pitch black allowing her imagination to run wild. She courted lovers in the darkness of their gardens, solved mysteries in the shady back streets of London, and held the dark to her as she would a cloak on a cold winter's night.

Being bronzed cured her of that. A hundred years of darkness, with nothing to see or hear or touch, nothing but her own thoughts and memories to distract her. Throughout the months between McPherson pulling her from the chamber and her final meltdown in Yellowstone, she had barely slept. When she did it was with a light on, always. This seems a foolish custom to try to carry into her life with Nate though, and so she finds herself often lying awake, with him sleeping behind her, staring into the darkness of their bedroom.

She runs her thumb across the knuckles of her hand as she lies there, a simple gesture, but one that reminds her she is free to move, she is not trapped. What she cannot control is the path of her thoughts, and in that darkness they take her down dangerous ways. From dawn to dusk she plays her part - her job, her home, her family. But once the job is done, the home is silent, and her family are asleep, the doubt creeps in.

She tells herself this is the life she wants - a staid, normal, average life. She tells herself she does not want days of endless wonder, she does not want the adventure and mysteries that come with being part of the Warehouse. She tells herself she does not want to be extraordinary when all that extraordinariness has brought her is pain. She tells herself she is happy.

An inner voice that sounds an awful lot like her brother Charles says that yes, she was always very good at fiction.

Another voice says, 'This life, it's not _you_.'

And that voice sounds nothing like Charles at all.

* * *

Myka allows herself to wallow in it for three days, the anger and the grief and the hurt that's tearing through her. She locks herself in her room and reads books she can barely see through her tears. She inventories the Warehouse, avoiding even the most vaguely Victorian artifacts. She runs in the searing heat, an embarrassingly depressing playlist on repeat on her 'whatever the hell it is Claudia made for her that's better than an iPod', and she grieves.

She's been here before with Sam, hell she's been here before with Helena, and so she lets herself just feel it, knowing that though it feels like it, it won't kill her. She'll come out the other side of this. She looks for what comfort she can find, in her books, in the Warehouse, in this oddball little family that she's come to rely on.

Pete is even more Pete than usual, his goofiness exaggerated for her benefit. Underneath his ridiculous behaviour and crude jokes though, Myka reminds herself that this is a man who knows a thing or two about addiction, and how hard it is to be cut off from something you crave. Even at his most expansive, in his most idiotic performances, there's a light of understanding in his eyes when he looks her way. He's doing his best to be a distraction for her, and so she does her best to laugh or roll her eyes at him, just as she would have before. Neither of them believe in the performance, but she appreciates it nonetheless.

On the fourth day, she's standing in the office of the Warehouse with Claudia and Steve when Artie arrives with a file on their latest ping. She has the papers out of his hand before he's finished explaining just what it is he conjectures may be causing people in Phoenix to suffer eight hour long bouts of narcolepsy.

"I'll take this."

It's not a question but Artie nods anyway. "Then take it, and take Steve. Go go go." He ushers them out the door.

She starts reading the file as they make their way down the umbilicus, Steve following close behind her. He doesn't say a word but she can read his thoughts as sure as he could tell if she was lying.

"I need this Jinksy." Her eyes never leave the pages in her hands. "I need to get back out there."

"I get that." He nods, then lapses into silence for a few moments. "You know, tell me if it's none of my business, but I didn't really know her, not when you guys were working together anyway. If you ever want to talk to someone, someone outside of all that, you know I'm here."

The words in the file blur in front of her and she manages a grateful smile. "I don't, but thank you."

She punches in the code to take them outside and slips her shades on as Steve moves to unlock the car. She thinks back to her first mission after Sam died, protective duty on a tour of New York, and how she had pushed all thoughts not directly related to the job from her mind just to get through it.

It's almost a shock when she recognises the emotion blossoming in her chest as happiness, but it is. She's not that person any more, not someone who will wrap herself in work to the exclusion of the relationships around her. She has a family here, people who will let her grieve and be sad and still do her job. Artie with his gruff, paterfamilias routine; Pete with his constant, unwavering belief in her; Steve with his kind, calm presence and Claudia - Claudia who may be the only one as close to heartbroken by HG's absence as Myka herself is, and Myka takes some sort of solace in that.

She takes a deep breath and sits into the car. She had given Helena her blessing to be with Nate, to make her home there, all the while lying through her teeth. Now though she sends a genuine wish the other woman's way, that Helena finds the same sort of comfort with her makeshift family that Myka does with hers. It is a brief moment of graciousness before the heartache flares up again, but Myka clings to it all the way to the airport.

* * *

Three weeks after the incident with the jawbone, Helena and Nate are sitting at a small table in his favourite restaurant. Adelaide is with the sitter and attentive waiters are hovering close by, never letting their wine glasses go empty. She is eating wonderfully good food in the company of a handsome, wonderful man, and yet her gaze constantly strays out the window beside them, losing track of the conversation Nate is trying to have with her.

Eventually he sighs. "Emily."

She looks up at him with a distracted 'hmm?', the fork in her hand twirling loosely through her pasta dish.

"You're a million miles away." His hand covers hers across the table. "What is it?"

"I'm sorry." She drops her fork, taking a slow pull from her wine glass as she squeezes his hand briefly. "Just work stuff."

The lie should fall easily from her, it's a skill she perfected long ago after all, but Nate is unconvinced. She is, she realises, too genuinely distracted to put in the effort to lie about the whys of it.

He shakes his head and looks down at his empty plate. "Is it what happened, with Briggs?" His eyes are wary when he looks up at her, still unsure how to fit what he now knows about her now into the life he thought they were building together. She had told him what she could, that she had done some government work, that she had been part of a team with the agents he had met. He knew that things had ended badly, due to her grief over losing her daughter, and that for a time she had been dangerous. He wanted so badly to believe that she wasn't still, but then he would remember the fear that had gripped his heart when he got the phone call from Briggs ransoming his daughter. She had insisted they still call her Emily, but now every time he says her name he can taste the falseness of it.

She hesitates, her eyes moving towards the window then back to him. "In part," she concedes. "It's... it's everything, Nate."

He takes it in, nodding slightly. "Are you..." he almost swallows his words, almost backs down from the conversation he's been building up to ever since that woman showed up on his doorstep and turned Emily inside out. Only the thought of Adelaide gives him the courage to continue. "Are you happy?"

The weight of it, of both the question and the lie she would have to tell to answer it and keep him, is suddenly more than Helena can bear. The fact is when she thinks of happiness, she thinks of the Warehouse, of the smell of apples, of Myka. She thinks of how easily hate can turn to fear, and how a hundred years of hate have left her with a fear so profound that even the thought of chasing that happiness makes her want to prostrate herself in front of Nate, this wonderful, normal man, and beg him to let her stay.

His grip on her hand tightens as her silence answers the question for him. "You know I'm crazy about you, right? It's like," he laughs a little, "it's like sometimes I think you're too good to be real." She winces at the truth of that. "But I've got Adelaide to think about. She adores you, you know? But if you're not happy Emily, if there's somewhere, or someone you'd rather be with, then you're not doing her any favours staying here. Or me."

She swallows hard as she curses her own selfishness that has, yet again, hurt the people she claims to care about. Nate is looking at her with such pleading in his eyes, such painfully clear longing that if her heart was not already broken by the memory of that same look in softer brown eyes she would have caved then and there.

"You're right." She forces the words out in a thick voice. "You're right Nate and I am so, so desperately sorry."

His face falls, but he musters a sad smile and releases her hand. "Yeah, me too."

He doesn't ask, if it's the work or the woman that's taking her away from him and she is grateful for that.

As he signals for the check she wipes away a tear and remembers fondly her dear Woolly telling her, all those years ago, that she was the most fearless woman he had ever known. For everyone's sake, she hopes he was right.

* * *

She leaves early the next morning, after she and Nate sit Adelaide down to tell her what is happening. Helena expects tears, of which there are many, and recriminations, of which there are none. Instead the girl looks at her with an awareness far beyond her years and asks if maybe, when she is older, she could join her on one of her amazing adventures. Helena smiles and, thinking that in a century and a half far stranger things have happened, tells her that it is a distinct possibility. With a promise to keep in touch (by letter - some habits are harder to let go of than others) she says her final farewells and catches a cab to the car rental office.

From there she heads west, without a particular destination in mind, but aware of the fact that she is moving in the general direction of South Dakota and all that that entails. She turns the car off twice by mid-afternoon, once at a signpost for Rockford and again at the turnoff for Minneapolis. Each time she pulls the car over and gives herself a stern talking to before getting back on the main route, her heart thumping louder each mile that passes.

By the time she reaches Fairmont she is famished, and pulls into the first diner she comes across. The booths are mostly empty, just a couple of tables of locals and some travellers passing through. She settles into a booth, gratefully accepting the coffee the young waitress pours her, then nearly chokes on it as a familiar, tweed-clad woman slides into the seat opposite her, seemingly out of nowhere.

"Mrs. Frederic," she manages once she has recovered.

"Miss Wells."

The tone of the older woman's voice brings up a whole new fear in Helena. She had, after all, walked away from the Warehouse, told the Regents in no uncertain terms that she was done with that life. What if now, when she had barely summoned up the courage to try and return, they decided that she could not?

Mrs. Frederic nods at the waitress as she brings a second cup and pours more coffee, but leaves it untouched on the table in front of her.

"You're going back to the Warehouse?"

Helena wraps her hands around her mug, and stares into its depths as though the answers she seeks may be lurking there. "I was thinking of it. Of trying." She continues in a rush, "I'm well aware that I may not be wanted there, that I have used up an inordinate amount of last chances-"

"You have." Mrs. Frederic stops her with the smallest of hand gestures. "But given recent events, and how strenuously Agent Nielsen argued on your behalf, the Regents will be willing to hear you out, should you wish to petition them to return."

Helena tries not to place too much importance on the brief glimmer of hope that those words give her. "I should like that very much. Thank you."

"As to the rest, well," Mrs. Frederic stands and rests her hand on the back of the booth beside Helena. "That is up to them."

Ah yes, 'them'. It's easy for Helena to forget sometimes, that the Warehouse consists of more than Myka Bering. When she turns to reply, she finds she is alone, and she smiles at the familiarity of the disappearing act.

She pays for the coffee, all thoughts of food gone now, and sits back into her car. The GPS (wonderful invention!) tells her that it is a five hour drive to Univille, and if she pushes it she should be there by evening. She gathers her courage - an almost physical act given the effort it takes to quell the rolling pitch and heave of her stomach, and pulls out onto the road. If her hands grip the steering wheel a little tighter once she crosses the South Dakota border, she tries not to notice.

* * *

Abigail pops her head out of her room with a hurried 'just a minute!' when she hears the doorbell of the B&B ring out. Given that they don't actually take bookings, she is prepared to tell a hopeful traveller that they are currently booked out and give them directions to the nearest guesthouse. The woman standing outside the door when she opens it though, is no ordinary prospective guest, and Abigail wonders with a brief pang of professional curiosity just what could happen in someone's life to put that _look_ in their eyes.

"Oh, hello?"

At the sound of her accent, things click into place.

"You must be Miss Wells?" She suppresses a satisfied smile at the other woman's confusion and offers her hand. "Abigail Cho."

Helena takes stock of Leena's replacement, sparing a thought for the loss of a woman she would very much have liked to know better. "You were expecting me?"

Abigail shakes her head. "No, I'm just... intuitive, sometimes."

"Well then," Helena smiles "you shall certainly fit right in here."

The smile falls as another face appears over the doctor's shoulder, short red hair framing a shocked expression.

"Oh my god - HG?" Claudia is frozen only momentarily, then launches herself past Abigail, wrapping her arms around Helena's waist and crushing the breath from her lungs. The relief is so strong and Claudia's grip so tight that she feels light-headed, and has to fight for words.

"Claudia darling, how wonderful to see you."

"Are you back? Like back back?" The words come muffled from Helena's shirt where the young woman has buried her head.

"Well, I'm here." She can't keep the smile from her face as Claudia pulls back slightly, still keeping a firm grip on her shoulders. "The rest we shall see."

Claudia practically drags her into the sitting room, Abigail following behind.

"Pete and Myka are on their way back from San Francisco, they should be here soon." Helena is pulled down to the couch where Claudia sinks down beside her. "So where the hell have you been? Tell me everything."

So Helena begins to recount the story of her time in hiding with the astrolabe. The distraction of spinning a good tale is almost enough to keep her nervousness at bay, and she has just reached the point in her story where she is telling Claudia about a night spent in the worst motel she'd ever encountered when the sound of the front door opening drags her back to the present.

"Pete that is _not_ what the artifact was meant to do." Myka's exasperated voice precedes the two agents into the room.

"Oh yeah? Then why does it have the word horn in it's name, huh? I mean if it's not..." he trails off as he takes in the scene in the room.

Helena stands, her eyes locked to Myka's as she twists the chain of the locket around her neck. A dozen conversations that she had rehearsed on the long drive here flee her mind and instead she finds herself simply looking, dumbstruck as an awkward teenager. Finally she opens her mouth, aware of the mounting silence, and takes a deep breath.

"Myka..."

She doesn't get to finish her sentence as Myka spins on her heel and storms up the stairs, her footsteps the only sound echoing throughout the house.

The slamming of a bedroom door from upstairs makes everyone wince and Helena takes a step forward, intent on following her until Pete steps into her path.

"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute." He holds up his hands, blocking her without actually touching her. His face is somehow both sympathetic and furious. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Pete, I have to-"

"You have to what, HG? Come mess up her life again?"

"I have to make it right." When she looks at him it is with an honesty that he has never seen in her before and his hands drop to his side.

"Look, whatever you're here for, whatever it is you think you want to say, you'd better be sure of it." His tone is gentler, but still laced with steel. "Because every time you leave, every time you go cray cray or become a hologram or turn into Emily Lake and push her away, I'm the one left picking her back up. And she's strong - she's so strong - but she can't keep doing it."

"Neither can I." She looks at him, hoping whatever vibes his picking up can convey her sincerity. "Pete, I promise you, I have never been more sure of anything in my life."

He stares at her for a long moment before he steps back out of her way and nods once.

"Then go get her."

Myka can't contain the whirlwind of emotion coursing through her as she paces the floor of her bedroom.

How dare she? How dare she just show up here unannounced, standing in Myka's home like she belongs there? After everything she'd said, everything she'd done in Wisconsin, what right does she have now to just show up out of the blue, before Myka's even had time to let her most recent wounds scar over?

The anger is overwhelming, and it's also easy - far easier than dealing with the simultaneous wash of pure joy that just seeing her face causes - so Myka clings to that.

She clings to it so tightly that when the knock on her door, accompanied by a softly-modulated 'Myka' comes, she flings it open and doesn't give Helena time to speak.

"This is not okay." Any argument is forestalled by Myka turning her back and pacing further into the room. "You can't do this, Helena. You can't just disappear and then show up again like this."

"Myka, darling please."

The 'darling' flips her rage from red hot to white cold. The look on Helena's face when she rounds on her makes it dissipate entirely.

She has seen a lot of the faces of H.G. Wells, but she has never seen her scared before. Even as she faced her death with the destruction of the Janus Coin, there was a sad resolve that outweighed any fear. The woman standing in her bedroom now though is absolutely terrified. Her anger slips away and she is left feeling sad and suddenly very tired.

"What do you want, Helena?"

A bright huff of uncertain laughter passes Helena's lips. "What do I want? Well I suppose the simple answer to that, Myka, is that I want you."

"Really?" Her disbelief is evident. "Because less than a month ago you said you wanted Nate, that he was normal and-" Myka cuts herself off, unwilling to replay that conversation in her head, hating the undertone of bitterness that somehow escaped her mouth. She's trying so hard _not_ to be bitter, she's trying so hard to be okay.

"And that his being a civilian was what I liked about him, that for the first time in over a century I felt like I belonged. That I was trying something new." Helena recounts it word for word then catches Myka's hurt gaze and holds it, a wry smile on her lips. "I've always had a good memory for the stories I create."

Myka feels a brief flare of satisfaction that at least she can acknowledge the lie, then closes her eyes and shakes her head. "This isn't one of your stories Helena, this is my life. You can't just breeze in and out of it for dramatic effect."

Helena takes an unconscious step closer, hands twitching at her side. "All my life I've worn a mask." She pauses, Myka's eyes back on her now. "As a child I stole scraps of candles so I could stay up once the rest of my family had retired, sketching blueprints for fantastical devices in an old accounts book. I had to hide it from everyone, my mother would have called it a waste of time and my father would have been furious that I was intruding into what he considered a man's work. So I lived the life of an inventor while pretending that I wasn't one. Later I wrote stories that I had to pass off as my brother's work. I travelled the world, and saved it once or twice, working for the warehouse and telling everyone that I was a clerk for a merchant firm. Even in this age, after I was debronzed, I played the part of a dutiful agent and all the while I was plotting to destroy the world. I've never actually been _me_, Myka. When I met Nate, and then Adelaide, I thought that Emily Lake would be as good a person as any to fit into that world, I thought she was another mask that I could wear as easily as I wore all those others."

She stops, fighting for the words she wants. Myka can practically hear the gears turning in her head, a writer struggling for the perfect phrase. "Then why aren't you?" her voice is close to a whisper, her eyes brimming as she tries to reconcile this suddenly familiar woman in front of her, bringing out the same feelings of frustration and tenderness and _want_, with the cold forensic scientist who'd sent her away with promises of coffee and friendship. "Why aren't you with him? Being normal, being ordinary?"

"Because one thing I've tried never to be is a hypocrite." Helena's eyes are dry but her face is set with a determination Myka recognises as a firm hand clamped on her emotions, and she hates that she can read her so well. "I told you once not to walk away from your truth, and yet when it came to it I ran from mine. There are only two things in my long life that have been truly honest - being a mother to Christina, and my love for you."

It's said so casually that Myka wonders why she ever thought it would be otherwise. She can't look away now, every inch of her riveted to the spot by the sudden charge in the air. Helena moves forward, consciously now closing the gap between them so she can take Myka's hands in her own.

"Having one taken from me left me with such fear, such dread of loss that I could hardly bear to face the other." She raises one hand, cupping Myka's cheek as her thumb brushes tears away. "You could break me darling, easier than you know." Her voice cracks and Myka, lost in those eyes, lost in her own rush of conflicting emotions, recalls every time that Helena has broken her. She has the sense of something fragile in her hands, something precious and feather-light and she fights the impulse to grasp it too tightly.

"You can't leave again." It's blunter than what she had intended to stay, but more honest too. "I can't. I can't lose you again."

"Darling," Helena manages to find an actual smile somewhere in the midst of her own inner turmoil, "I have so much to make up to you I imagine it would take me the best part of a lifetime to do it."

Helena's hand hasn't moved from her cheek and so Myka leans into that touch, leans in so there is no longer any space between them, and surrenders. Her lips meet Helena's softly, ghosting over the thousand imagined kisses she has already placed there, and all the tension leave her body in a sigh that is somewhere between resignation and relief.

For long moments they are lost in one another, and even though Myka had protested at the thought of being part of some created narrative, this kiss feels more like a fairytale than she'd care to admit. It is the closing of a painful chapter, the turning of a page, the promise of a story yet to come.

Given that the woman that she's kissing left one of the world's greatest literary legacies a hundred years ago, and yet somehow, improbably is here in her arms, telling and retelling their own story against her lips, Myka imagines that it will be an interesting one at the very least.

She's right.


End file.
